I Nengah Januartha

Even I’ve using FlashDevelop as my prior Flash developing tools beside Flex (now Flash Builder) for couple years, Beginner’s Guide to FlashDevelop – Basix, an article by Michael Williams still interesting to read. In case I missed some tips

If you’re a Windows user and work with Action Script and Flash, and looking for developing tool for free, this tool is recommended.

Flash Player 10.2 Beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux is now available for download on Adobe Labs. Flash Player 10.2 beta introduces a number of enhancements we’re excited to share, including Stage Video, a new API that delivers best-in-class, high performance video playback across platforms. The new beta also includes Internet Explorer 9 hardware acceleration support previewed earlier (in Flash Player “Square”), enhanced text rendering, and two popular requests from the community: a native custom mouse cursors API and support for full screen playback with multiple monitors.

Key new capabilities in the Flash Player 10.2 beta include:

• Stage Video hardware acceleration — A new method for video playback in Flash Player will allow developers to leverage complete hardware acceleration of the video rendering pipeline, enabling best-in-class playback performance. Stage Video can dramatically decrease processor usage and enables higher frame rates, reduced memory usage, and greater pixel fidelity and quality.
• Internet Explorer 9 hardware accelerated rendering support — Flash Player takes advantage of hardware accelerated graphics in Internet Explorer 9, utilizing hardware rendering surfaces to improve graphics performance and enable seamless composition.
• Native custom mouse cursors — Developers can define custom native mouse cursors, enabling user experience enhancements and improving performance.
• Support for full screen mode with multiple monitors — Full screen content will remain in full-screen on secondary monitors, allowing users to watch full-screen content while working on another display.

Great slides from Hemanth Sharma, Platform Evangelist at Adobe Systems about Multiscreen Experiences using Flash Platform. These slides has presented during Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010

Great video by Thimbaul Imbert about Optimizing content for Flash Player 10.1

Best Practices in optimizing content for Flash Player 10.1 from Thibault Imbert on Vimeo.

About a week ago I got request to make password field not appearing asterisks (*) but a dot (•).  After trying to goggling to find something similar, then I got a good example by Carlos Yanez at ActiveTuts.  But still some bugs with his class, where problem on fast typing, using home, left, right arrow, delete only deleting 1 char event we did select some chars.

Someone in comment section also try to fixed with better class, but still the same problem with home, or deleting chars on selection.

With started from that article, I try to fixed and add some update and work for me.
Here the class:

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package com.janumedia.util
{
	import flash.events.Event;
	import flash.events.KeyboardEvent;
	import flash.events.TextEvent;
	import flash.events.TimerEvent;
	import flash.text.TextField;
	import flash.text.TextFormat;
	import flash.ui.Keyboard;
	import flash.utils.Timer;
 
	public class PasswordMaker
	{
		private var _target:TextField;
		private var _regExp:RegExp = /./g;
		private var _timer:Timer
		private var _oriPass:String = "";
 
		public function PasswordMaker()
		{
		}
 
		public function setPassword (t:TextField, delay:Number=500) : void
		{
			_timer = new Timer(delay);
			_target = t;
			_oriPass = _target.text;
 
			_timer.addEventListener (TimerEvent.TIMER, replaceOnTime, false, 0, true);
			_target.addEventListener (TextEvent.TEXT_INPUT, startTimer, false, 0, true);
			_target.addEventListener (KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, keyboardEvent, false, 0, true);
 
			// dispatchEvent in case already has text initializing
			_target.dispatchEvent( new TextEvent (TextEvent.TEXT_INPUT) );
		}
 
		public function getPassword () : String
		{
			return _oriPass;
		}
 
		private function replaceOnTime (e:TimerEvent) : void
		{
			var fm:TextFormat = _target.getTextFormat();
			fm.letterSpacing = 3;
 
			_target.text = _oriPass.replace (_regExp, "•");
			_target.setTextFormat(fm);
 
			_timer.stop();
		}
 
		private function keyboardEvent (e:KeyboardEvent) : void
		{
			// single char deletion
			if (_target.selectionBeginIndex == _target.selectionEndIndex)
			{
				if (e.keyCode == Keyboard.BACKSPACE)
				{
					_oriPass = _oriPass.substr(0, _target.caretIndex-1) + _oriPass.substr(_target.caretIndex)
 
				} else if (e.keyCode == Keyboard.DELETE)
				{
					_oriPass = _oriPass.substr(0, _target.caretIndex) + _oriPass.substr(_target.caretIndex+1)
				}
 
			// multiple chars deletion
			} else 
			{
				if (e.keyCode == Keyboard.BACKSPACE || e.keyCode == Keyboard.DELETE)
				{
					_oriPass = _oriPass.substr(0, _target.selectionBeginIndex) + _oriPass.substr(_target.selectionEndIndex)
				}
			}
		}
 
		private function startTimer (e:TextEvent) : void
		{
			if (_target.selectedText.length > 0)
			{
				_oriPass = _oriPass.substring(0,_target.selectionBeginIndex) + e.text + _oriPass.substring(_target.selectionEndIndex)
 
			} else 
			{
				_oriPass = _oriPass.substring(0,_target.caretIndex) + e.text + _oriPass.substring(_target.caretIndex)
			}
 
			if (_timer.running) _timer.reset();
 
			_timer.start();
		}
 
		public function reset () : void
		{
			_oriPass = "";
		}
 
	}
}

Flash Platform Evangelist Enrique Duvos examines the benefit of integrating Flex-based RIAs with online transaction payments, and then walks you through the code.

Future Multitouch Meeting Room from Oli Mival on Vimeo.

This is PyMT (Python Multitouch project) which can be found over at the Natural User Interface group site.